Monday, November 12, 2007

Korea Notes 3

In many productions I've worked on-even when we have strong expressive dynamic layouts, the animation will come back soft and mushy and all the pose artists are dumbfounded.

Here are the two main reasons that happens:

These notes could just as easily apply to many American shows today. That second set of blanded Boo Boos is still more lively than many prime time cartoons I've seen!

Many service studios, once you have convinced them to actually use your drawings, will not add any breakdowns and will merely inbetween your poses-and use even timing. This makes the characters float from pose to pose and you don't feel any of the poses.Please excuse the million exclamation points. I was in quite a frustrated state the day I scribbled these notes out!

14 comments:

When are are you putting your Korean notes and all the other great lessons from this blog into a book? I've learned more about layouts, backgrounds, character design & storytelling here than I have from any other single source. I would certainly shell out a few bucks to have it all printed out and bound!

Can you note where you want the accents and cushioning on a simple chart or do you have to indicate that in thumbnail drawings or in writing?Would pose number 5 be considered an 'extreme' or a 'breakdown'?

Hello John, I Am nacho and study fine arts in Spain. I am a follower and your admirer and I would like to congratulate you for each and every of your creations. They seem to me to be fantastic the way in which you manage to mix the expressiveness, the good humor, the perversion and the animation. Really you manage to do that I laugh.

I agree with Chris. I thank you each and every day for providing this stuff online for free! But you could also upload all these production notes to LuLu.com and set a price, and the book is available print-on-demand. Just like CafePress, but with books instead of apparel. You must have hundreds of pages of useful direction!

I know I'd buy a few copies for me and my like-minded pals. Something like this would really sell and fund your cartoon-makin' even further!

Great notes. I bet you get nervous putting stuff down as detailed as that breakdown in case every single movement in every single scene tries to mimic that, right?

Actually, you've done great stuff on the layouts but, due to the room for error, I'm curious as to your list of ingredients for your full pre-prod package to avoid mistakes.

I remember very early on in my career I was doing work for hire on an overseas production and I can't count the number of times either the slugging simply didn't work or we got notes back that began with "I know what it has in the boards but what we actually meant was..."

I am going to admit I am ignorant on several of the technical terms used in animation but the images say it all. These notes seem like common sense to me and it's appauling you had to explain this John.